


Lost and Found

by Frangipanidownunder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:39:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16299146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frangipanidownunder/pseuds/Frangipanidownunder
Summary: Missing scene from End Game. How does Mulder tell his mother that Samantha was a clone?





	Lost and Found

She’s upright in her chair, looking towards the window, because it’s too hard to look out on the world when you’ve cut yourself off with prim swathes of lace. There are several glossy magazines fanned across the polished surface of the thick-legged coffee table. A coaster depicting a Victorian watercolour of a forget-me-not. An empty vase stands on the side table in the sour lemon glow of a fringed standard lamp. Teena Mulder is a portrait waiting to be painted. Neat, contained. A vessel holding in a life.

“Mom,” he ventures, stepping onto the carpet’s lush pile, so incongruent to the hollowness of everything else in the room.

“Fox?” She snaps her head round to him but doesn’t smile. He can’t remember the last time he saw her smile. Even when Samantha was in the living room she was bewildered, thankful, amazed, confused, lost but not happy. Teena Mulder’s happiness vanished along with her daughter, one cold November night.

She taps the chair next to her, unfolds a handkerchief and dabs at her nose. “I was just thinking…” but she doesn’t tell him what about.

You realise what losing her again is going to do to your mother? Do you? The blame loaded into every syllable of his father’s statement is still bitter on his tongue. How do you tell your mother that her missing daughter was found and is now dead and yet was not her daughter at all?

“How are you, Mom?” Whatever you’re feeling you can’t blame yourself. From his father’s slow-burning rage to his partner’s light tone of empathy, he has yawed on the waves of what seems like a fitting destiny. Telling his mother the truth.

“Samantha hasn’t been back,” she says to the empty vase. “I thought we might visit that little antique store on Main, you know the one? With the olive green sign out front that says…oh, I forget what it’s called now. My memory is…sit down, Fox. Please. You’re making me tired watching you like that. You always did like to stand, run, climb. Always poking your nose into holes and touching things and picking up bugs. Samantha was content to sit and read or draw.”

The cool covering of the chair is slippery and the smooth wood under his hands leaves him unable to anchor himself. His mother carries on and on, remembering minutiae from a childhood that was so abruptly ripped from his grasp.

“Samantha won’t be back, Mom.”

He slips it in between the near-drowning on the beach when he got rumbled by a breaker and the nest of robin’s eggs he hid under the desk in his room. She looks at him, hanky pressed to her mouth but her expression doesn’t change. She simply stands and takes a gilt-framed photo from the mantel. Smiling Samantha, all braids and braces, chin resting on hands, elbows dug into the grass, one foot up behind her.

“We ate that toffee ice cream you used to say tasted like melted honeycombs, remember, Fox? And Samantha would cry because she thought all the bees would die.”

“It wasn’t really her. That woman, Samantha. It wasn’t her.”

His mother clutches the photo to her chest and her hanky floats to the carpet. “She would like the desk in the antique shop. It has gold curlicues inlaid into the top and it’s polished mahogany. A bit like the one your father had in his study, do you recall it? Samantha sat at that desk and drew horses on the blotter pad and your father would get so angry because she’d use all his ink cartridges. That blue-black. So dark, so, so dark.”

He pats her shoulder, once, twice, feels the delicate pattern of the knitted cardigan under his touch. She leans a little towards him and he breathes in the lavender scent of her. Her skin is surprisingly smooth against his rough cheek. She doesn’t weep. She doesn’t sink into him. She lets him embrace her and the edge of the photo frame digs in between his shoulders.

“It would have been nice to take her to that shop, don’t you think? Eat ice cream.”

“Yes, Mom. It would.”

He drives back down Main Street. The shop is open but he doesn’t go in. He shades his eyes to see through the window. The desk is resolute in the corner. He pictures Samantha – the child – sitting at a chair, crossed legs swinging beneath her, tongue between teeth, sketching with one of their father’s fountain pens.

We know where your sister is. It’s more a threat now, than a lead. If he finds her, then what? He will be forever responsible for her being back, instead of being missing. He steps back into the late sun. The sign on the antique shop fascia reads ‘Lost and Found’.

He stops by the camp shop further along the strip and picks up some cold weather gear. His flight from Tecoma leaves first thing.


End file.
